Secret Cameras Scanned Crowd at Super Bowl for Criminals

Unknown to the 100,000 people who passed through the turnstiles at Sunday’s Super Bowl, hidden cameras scanned each of their faces and compared the portraits with photos of terrorists and known criminals of every stripe.

In a command post at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the digitized images of fans and workers were cross-checked against files of local police, the FBI and state agencies at the rate of a million images a minute.

The cameras identified 19 people with criminal histories, none of them of a “significant” nature, Tampa authorities said. But the undisclosed first test of the technology at a major U.S. sporting event raised arguments about privacy versus security and questions about the future of such spying and its uses.

“Oh my God, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of personal liberty,” said Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technical officer of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., a security monitoring company.

“It’s another manifestation of a surveillance society, which says we’re going to watch you all the time just in case you might do something wrong,” said Schneier, whose book “Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World” warned of the increasing encroachment on civil liberties in high-tech society.

But USC law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a nationally recognized authority on constitutional law, said the right to privacy doesn’t extend to places quite so public.

“I’m troubled by the extensive use of cameras to monitor us when we’re in public places, but that doesn’t mean it’s illegal or unconstitutional,” Chemerinsky said. “People have no reasonable expectation that when out in public, they cannot be photographed.”

Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin said the department jumped at the chance to borrow the technology after Graphco Technologies Inc. approached it and allowed it a tryout for free.

“It’s just another high-tech tool that is available,” Durkin said. “We used it for a week to test it, evaluate it and see if we liked it. And yes, we did like it. Very much so.”

Durkin said the department wanted to screen for pickpockets and other potential scam artists drawn to the huge event and for potential terrorists who wanted to use its worldwide TV and radio audience to make a political statement.

“Clearly, the vast majority of citizens would applaud our efforts to make Super Bowl XXXV as safe as we did,” he said. “And I’ll tell you, had this system identified some known terrorist because of the size of the event and the eyes of the world on Tampa, and the police stopped the terrorist act, the system would have proved priceless.”

No arrests were made that day. But, Durkin said, “it alerted us that they were there. It confirmed our suspicions that a crowd of this magnitude would attract people trying to take advantage of the situation.”

Oakland Raiders Senior Assistant Bruce Allen agreed with the need.

“Whatever they want to do to protect this country, I’m for. . . . So anything we can do to help, I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with that.”

Critics warn, however, of the potential for error.

“What if I have the same shaped nose as John Dillinger? Am I going to get frisked?” asked Clifford Stoll, author of books questioning the applications of technology and their benefits to society.

Although advocates insist such technologies are reliable, he added, “that’s what J. Edgar Hoover said when he measured the head shape of criminals to determine the standard appearance of a criminal.”

Other applications are expected to include ATM machines and public events such as the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

The popularity of facial-recognition technology is also spreading in Las Vegas, where a growing number of casinos employ it to identify criminal suspects or unwanted gamblers--including card counters and those listed in the “Black Book” of banned casino guests.

But not everyone who enters a casino, where “eye-in-the-sky” surveillance cameras are a long-accepted feature, is automatically photographed, according to the corporate spokesman for three of Las Vegas’ largest casinos using the technology. Rather, a person is photographed, and his facial features scanned, only if he is suspected of being a criminal or otherwise unwanted at the casino, said Alan Feldman, vice president of MGM Mirage.

What happened at Sunday’s Super Bowl, however, signals a revolution in spying technology with possibly grave implications, Schneier said.

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Times staff writers Tom Gorman, Charles Piller, Sam Farmer and researcher Michael Faneuff contributed to this story.